No honest journalist should be willing to describe himself or herseif as 'embedded.' To say, 'I'm an embedded journalist' is to say, 'I'm a government Propagandist.

If something comes along that you don't like, there are a few sort of four-letter words that you can use to push it out of the sphere of discussion. If you were in a bar downtown, they might have different words, but if you're an educated person what you use are complicated words like "conspiracy theory" or "Marxist." It's a way of pushing unpleasant questions off the agenda so that we can continue in our own happy ideology.

If you have to control people, you have to have an administrative force that does it. So in U.S. industry, even more than elsewhere, there's layer after layer of management - a kind of economic waste, but useful for control and domination. And the same is true in universities.

If you want to scare people, you talk about evil.

In my experience at least, the large public universities do not fall behind in fostering creativity and independence; often the contrary.

Every great power, every aggressive power has always regarded itself as exceptional and as doing things only for the most moral ends.

What happened in the missile crisis in October 1962 has been prettified to make it look as if acts of courage and thoughtfulness abounded. The truth is that the whole episode was almost insane.